Ooyala

» see ooyala.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

ooyala was the kind of product broadcasters used, and i was never a broadcaster. it sat behind the video on media companies' sites, doing the hosting and the analytics, and the whole point of it was that you the viewer never saw its name. so it never surfaced for me the way a consumer app would. i met it later, reading about how it died, the way an engineer meets a lot of the backend companies whose logos never reach a user.

three engineers who had left google, brothers Bismarck and Belsasar Lepe with their friend Sean Knapp, started it in 2007 in santa clara. the pitch was solid business infrastructure, an online video platform that publishers and broadcasters could pay to run their video on instead of building it themselves. for a while that was a good business to be in, video was moving online fast and nobody wanted to build the pipes twice. money came in behind it.

the australian telecom Telstra saw the same thing everyone else did. it led a thirty-five million dollar round in june 2012, then bought its way up to owning about ninety-eight percent of Ooyala by october 2014, in a deal valued around two hundred and seventy million dollars. telstra wanted a media-tech arm, and ooyala looked like the way to buy one.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

the trouble was the market got crowded and the advertising side never performed. Ooyala had bought its way into ad tech, and that part dragged. Telstra wrote down the value of the company by two hundred and forty-six million dollars in 2016, admitting most of what it had paid was gone. in february 2018 it wrote off nearly all the rest, another two hundred and seventy-three million. an acquisition that had looked like a media-tech arm turned into one of the more expensive lessons in owning a video startup.

~ what really happened ~

telstra gave up. in october 2018 it sold ooyala back to the company's own management and walked away from the whole investment. the management buyout did not save it. in february 2019 the online video platform business was sold to Brightcove for fifteen million dollars, a fraction of what telstra had once paid, and the flex media side went to Dalet a few months later. brightcove ran the acquired platform down and set its end for april 2020. the name is gone now. it lies with [[veoh]] and [[ustream]], the video companies that learned the pipes were never where the money settled.

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